Three and a half years ago, Google made what seemed to be a pretty big $100 million acquisition: FeedBurner. You remember that company, right? They’re the ones that dominated RSS management before all of that real time tech came along and rendered it obsolete for many people. Today, Google is putting the real time paddles to FeedBurner’s heart in an attempt to rivive it.

If you visit FeedBurner today, you’ll see a “Try out our NEW (beta) version!” message in the top menu. Clicking on this will take you to the new version. So what’s new? The entire look and feel has been revamped. The new Home screen is loaded up with overview stats and alerts for the sites you run. But the real key, of course, is in the Feeds area.

Here’s you’ll see a completely new way of looking at your subscribers and data. In a move that should surprise no one, it looks a lot more like Google Analytics. But the key is what’s going on behind the scenes. As Google notes:

The real story is what’s new under the hood, however: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens.

In fact, Google mentions Twitter a couple times in their post about the update — more than they mention their own RSS reader product, Google Reader. Clearly, they see where the future of content consumption is heading.

And it’s interesting that Twitter is so vital here. One of FeedBurner’s co-founders and CEO was Dick Costolo — yes, the same man who is now the CEO of Twitter.

Costolo left Google in July of 2009 after he had already moved on from the FeedBurner team. It seemed pretty clear to many of us that after the acquisition, Google wasn’t putting the resources it should have into the product. And its time at Google has been filled with bugs, problems, and a general growing disinterest from most users.

Maybe that will change now. Maybe. This update is about two years too late.

[thanks Michael]

• Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.
• Web 2 Summit: Jonathan Miller Is Obsessed With Realtime, Won’t Talk…

Rock-solid research (ok, not really) shows that you’re all liars (ok, not really).

A UK insurance company called Direct Line asked an agency called Opinium Research to carry out a study on dishonesty on social networking sites for its latest ‘Straight Talking Report’.

The research firm polled just over 2,000 British adults on the Web from 3rd -7th June 2010, and discovered a shocking truth: that people are not always honest when they’re able to hide behind a screen name and an avatar rather than talk face-to-face.

I know, I know.

Take a minute to calm down, breathe in and out, and continue as soon as you’re ready.

The ‘Straight Talking Report’ found that people are more likely to be dishonest when talking on social networking sites such as Twitter, than they would be when talking to someone in meat space. According to the research, just one in five people (20%) profess to being more truthful on Twitter or text, compared to a third (31%) who state that they are more frank when speaking to someone in real life.

Furthermore, men are said to be less likely to be honest via text messages than women (17% of men compared to 21% of women). Or women are more likely to lie when polled, of course.

Another nugget: women are less likely to be truthful in person than men, with 12% more men claiming to be honest face-to-face than women. I told you it was a shocker.

I’ll leave you with psychologist Glenn Wilson, who delivered the obligatory quote meant to add some pseudo-scientific credibility to the mix:

“Modern technologies, such as smartphones, social networking and instant messaging have been hailed as innovations in the way people interact, removing obstacles to conversation and allowing for openness of discourse.

However, we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don’t have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language.”

An astute observation – and I’m not even lying.

• Winner’s Curse: Why Losing A B-School Biz Plan Competition Is Better…
• Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.

Well would you look at that. Earlier today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on a bit of a tirade against Google and Android in particular. And you know that couldn’t have made Android chief Andy Rubin too happy. But how was he going to respond? Well, he decided to awaken his dormant Twitter account and send his first tweet tonight. And sure enough, it’s clearly (but subtly) in response to Jobs.

Without further ado, here is Andy Rubin’s first tweet:

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”

For those keeping score at home, that’s Rubin using some geeked-out lingo to explain exactly what open is to Steve Jobs. In other words: Android.

Well played.

Rubin has about 100 followers right now. That should skyrocket shortly.

Welcome to Twitter, Andy! I wouldn’t expect a response from Jobs, as he doesn’t use the service. But maybe Apple SVP Scott Forstall will respond instead (he has yet to tweet and still only follows Conan)?

Earlier, I didn’t have a way to verify for certain if it was Rubin or not, so I had some qualified words just in case it wasn’t. I’ve since confirmed with a couple of people in the know that it is in fact him, so I’ve updated the wording.

[thanks Jon]

• NSFW: Give me ad-free conversations, or give me death (please RT)
• Dr. TweetLove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the @Ev Bomb

Y Combinator-backed design startup COLOURlovers.com, which is a creative community for color, has the honor of being the official Twitter profile design extension. COLOURlovers’ Themeleon, a tool that lets Twitter users create customized and sleek profile pages, has helped design 2 million Twitter profiles in the past year (Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is a fan).

Now that Twitter has released a new version of Twitter with a different layout, Themeleon has updated its offering to adjust to the new interface. The startup has moved the Themeleon tool into the collapsable area at the top of the page and now gives a live preview of what your new profile will actually look like as you click around and design your Twitter page.

While you can access more than 1 million color palettes and 1 million Seamless Patterns created by the COLOURlovers.com community, Themeleon is also offerng ready-made themes from new partner TweetyGotBack.com (which we wrote about here).

• Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.
• Web 2 Summit: Jonathan Miller Is Obsessed With Realtime, Won’t Talk…